Brave New Hamburger

  Fifty years hence we will escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
—Winston Churchill, 1932

You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest.
—The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, 1952

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on . . .
—David Bowie, 1969

In 1912, a surgeon named Alexis Carrel cut out a piece of a chicken embryo heart—still warm and living—and placed it in a glass dish in his laboratory.

He took good care of the little piece of tissue, feeding it well. The chicken heart lived for over three decades. When Carrel died in 1944, the heart was still alive and kicking.

Carrel's Nobel Prize–winning work changed the course of medicine and biology forever—in all ways except one. If you could grow chicken hearts in a petri dish, couldn't you grow chicken nuggets in a petri dish too?

In a recent article in the journal Tissue Engineering, a small group of researchers outlined an ambitious proposal for ways to move forward with cultured-meat production—that is, meat made from animal cells, grown outside of the animal's body. The basic idea is this: All meat is essentially muscle tissue marbled with fat. If you grew enough of these cells, you could theoretically make actual meat—without resorting to soy or slaughterhouses. Ideally, you could make thousands, if not millions, of nuggets from a single chicken using this method.

The idea of a lab-grown chicken nugget might seem gross, but consider the way they're already being manufactured. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser tantalizingly describes them as "small pieces of reconstituted chicken . . . held together by stabilizers, breaded, fried, frozen, and then reheated." Jason Matheny, a graduate student in public health at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the Tissue Engineering article, argues that there's nothing natural about a slaughterhouse, either. "It is unnatural, actually culturing things outside of an animal," he says. "On the other hand, you don't find intensively confined animals on antibiotics and growth promoters in the forest. I think part of the reaction to cultured meat is based on not knowing how their meat is produced. I think if most people visited what they call a 'concentrated animal feeding operation'—a CAFO—they would be very surprised. Most animals are housed indoors in huge warehouses where they never see sunlight, kept at incredibly high densities living in their own filth, and fed a range of drugs in order to increase their own growth rate, which isn't a very natural thing."

It wasn't until the 1990s that a few scientists put two and two together and tried to grow meat in vitro. Part of the reason why it's taken so long is that cultured-meat research is a highly underfunded proposition involving a mere handful of researchers. The exception is Holland, where the government has enthusiastically devoted half a million dollars to the advancement of cultured meat. (Hank Heksmaan, professor of meat studies at the University of Utrecht, is one of the leaders of the field.)

Cultured meat even gets short shrift in the realm of science fiction. Outside of the vat-grown Chicken Little in The Space Merchants, there aren't too many spellbinding examples. "Sci-fi novels usually have something like those devices that Star Trek has, where you push the button and out comes a fruit cocktail or something like that," notes Morris Benjaminson, a professor in the applied-bioscience program at Touro College School of Health Sciences and co- author of several pioneering meat experiments. "Something that's constituted directly from matter, whatever molecules happen to be available, can be hooked together to form whatever it is that you want."

Benjaminson was trying to figure out a way to make fish available to astronauts. Astronauts on very long space missions are de facto vegetarians, since it's hard to get fresh meat on board. In an article published in Acta Astronautica in 2002, Benjaminson's group took chunks of goldfish and put them in petri dishes with plenty of a standard nutrient medium. The goldfish chunks grew in size over a few weeks.